Every so often, Brandi Koskie finds dozens of photos of her 3-year-old daughter, Paisley, on her iPhone – but they aren’t ones Koskie has taken.

“There’ll be 90 pictures, sideways, of the corner of her eye, her eyebrow,” said Koskie, who lives in Wichita, Kan. “She’s just tapping her way right into my phone.”

The hidden photos, all shot by Paisley, illustrate a phenomenon familiar to many parents in today’s tech-savvy world: Toddlers love selfies. Observant entrepreneurs have caught on to these image-obsessed tots, marketing special apps that make taking photos super-easy for little fingers. You can even buy a pillow with a smartphone pocket so toddlers can take selfies during diaper changes.

But toddlers aren’t the only ones taking photos nonstop. It’s not unusual for doting parents to snap thousands of digital photos by the time their child is 2. Today’s toddlers think nothing of finding their own biopic stored in a device barely bigger than a deck of cards.

…

Tot-centric snapshots can help build a healthy self-image and boost childhood memories when handled correctly, but shooting too many photos or videos and playing them back instantly for a demanding toddler could backfire, said Deborah Best, a professor of cognitive developmental psychology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.

The instant gratification that smartphones provide today’s toddlers is “going to be hard to overcome,” she said. “They like things immediately, and they like it short and quick. It’s going to have an impact on kids’ ability to wait for gratification. I can’t see that it won’t.”

Stereotypes portray the teen brain as an out-of-control car with “no brakes, no steering wheel, and only an accelerator,” says APS Fellow BJ Casey. Research shows that teenagers take risks because reward centers develop more quickly than control centers in their brains. But changes in the adolescent brain ultimately help prepare teens to become independent of their parents. APS Fellow Ruth Feldman, Clancy Blair, and Angela L. Duckworth also speak about self-regulation across the lifespan in APS President Nancy Eisenberg’s 2015 Presidential Symposium.

Regulation – a multilayered construct defined by the interplay of excitation and inhibition –undergoes substantial development across the first decade of life, is supported by bottom-up processes, and matures in […]